I have to get this out of me after finding out.
I was worked to death while I worked at Wendy's. We were the only Wendys in the area that closed at 2 am. It wasn't too bad for a regular employee. The old Gm Denise promoted me, but she left like two weeks after my promotion. However, when I worked for the new GM I saw the store in a whole new light.
I was overworked, underpaid, and constantly on the edge of mental anguish. From coworkers stealing out of backpacks to the new GM “Miguel” being the biggest hardass I ever met. I would have to work during my lunch break if it was busy, no 10 min breaks too. Never really treating us as people and more like a drill sergeant drilling orders into us. We had a very high turnover rate after he got hired. Instead of hiring more adults to cover night shifts, he hired more high schoolers which made things more difficult as everyone in the morning went into the night shift. we went from having maybe 1/10 of our employees high schoolers to almost 1/3.
However, the sketchiest thing he made me do was to use coupons and abuse them. Since I became a night manager Id work from 4pm to 3am/3:30 am. I would receive disciplinary action if the safe was short and Miguel always held that over my head. Yet he told me if you are short by not much you can use coupons on some orders and pocket the money into the safe to even it out. To verify he didn't force the morning leads to doing this, only me or the assistant gm who also closed.
I found this suspicious, but he was always blaming either I or the morning leads And no one wanted to get fired. We would be short 100-300 almost every day. I left because I was about to graduate and needed a better-paying job with manageable hours.
It's been a few years, but still have people I kept in contact with at that store.
short background on Miguel. He worked at 5 different stores before coming to ours. So he has a lot of experience. Usually, the guy people send to hard stores that need to get their act together.
Yet, my old coworker, told me the other day the police came and arrested him in the store. she was able to hear the convo of the district manager and the police and we found out a lot of shit.
His name wasn't even Miguel, he was using a different social for over a decade while working with Wendys. He slipped up bad apparently and they tracked that he was stealing almost 100k from each store he worked at in the span of 12 years. Almost 500k in total that he forced employees like me to cover his dirty work with the disguise of if you don't ill pin the blame on you because before this incident the District manager loved this man and he was about to get a promotion to be a district manager. So no one would believe what we told them regardless.
This whole situation bugs me as I see how this man not only played the system and lost, but me stressing every night that the safe was going to be short made me so anxious about any other future employed I might have.
Luckily I am now in a union job and have good job security making a whole 11 dollars extra than what I getting at Wendy's.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I just had to share this absurd scenario.